Report on the Existing CNs and their Organization (v1)

This deliverable is devoted to build a homogeneous mapping of the Community Networks netCommons is working (or intends to work) with in Europe, plus a general overview of the many facets of the Community Network concept around the world, with the goal of providing a sort of taxonomy plus a rough global quantification of the phenomenon. For the development of the analysis framework we have worked with a few of the most representative Community Networks (CNs) and more relevant, one way or another, to the netCommons project. The next release of the deliverable in M9 will include more CNs in the analysis and also extended classification and insight. The report first of all review and partially re-define the concept of commons in the context of modern society and technologies. Next a description of the general framework for the comparative analysis of different CN instances is given trying to set a “reference conceptual architecture” that can help understanding different organizational models and different implementations of CNs. After this general and theoretical analysis, the deliverable reports a detailed analysis of a selection of CNs: guifi.net, FFDN, Ninux, and Sarantaporo.gr, that are so far the closest to netCommons and those with whom we already have contacts and are conducting field work and cooperation. have inspired the development of the general framework; An extensive list of many self-proclaimed CNs around the world and their rough organizational models closes this descriptive part of the Deliverable. The final part is devoted to a first comparison and classification of different models. The next WP1 deliverable (D1.2) in M9 will add more CNs and more details in the analysis, laying the foundations for the more theoretical work in WP4 and WP5.